A day abroad at Stanford in Italy
“Vuoi un caffei?” beams Antonella, my 60-something-year-old host mother, peeking up from the pot of espresso she is heating over the stove’s open flame. Coffee is a serious, serious business for Antonella, a retired schoolteacher who has made cooking her stock and trade. Achieving the perfect espresso is a daily necessity.
“Por favore,” I respond groggily, plopping down at the mahogany kitchen table, which is covered with assorted tins of biscotti and different fruit marmalades for breakfast. Outside, the ring of steeple bells wakes my sleepy neighborhood on Via dei Macci, a historic street a few blocks from the sprawling Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence, Italy. Stanford has had an abroad program in Florence for 50 years–one of the University’s earliest foreign outposts.
After breakfast, I grab my book bag and my door key, a three-inch contraption that looks to be straight out of the 1500s, and clamber down the four spiral flights of stairs for my morning Italian class. As I leave, my host mother reminds me to eat a good lunch–as if, in Italy, eating well is ever a problem. It speaks volumes about a culture where quel che non ti uccide, ti rafforza, “what won’t kill you will feed you,” is a popular proverb.
It takes 15 minutes to walk from Santa Croce across the Ponte alle Grazie, down the bank of the Arno River and up the five flights of stairs to my class at The Stanford Center, a towering building one block from Florence’s oldest bridge, the Ponte Vecchio. On my way to the Center, pony-tailed men lean casually against the storefront eaves catcalling “Ciao bella” at the sea of stiletto-clad women sauntering by. A fleet of mopeds careens down the impossibly narrow streets, scattering throngs of tourists that amble down the middle of the cobblestoned roads. As I arrive at the Stanford Center, I call out “Buongiorno!” to the silver-haired doorman at the entrance, who by now has become accustomed to the accented Italian that students shoot his way every morning.
After class, the afternoon is mine to do with what I like, which usually means a trip to a gelateria for a frozen snack followed by meandering through the streets. Before I know it, it’s nighttime, and Florence transforms into a different city.
The Piazza di Santa Croce, which by day houses hundreds of milling pigeons, becomes an epicenter for nighttime revelers. Clumps of Italian men and American students lounge on the basilica steps and pop open bottles of Chianti Classico beneath the towering statue of Dante Alighieri. Throngs of students prance down Via Verdi, stopping in the streets to greet their friends with the customary two-cheek kiss before ducking into one of the clubs blasting techno hits like “We No Speak Americano.”
A month ago, when 23 other Stanford students and I arrived in Florence for our quarter abroad, we were told to make the city our own. I didn’t know exactly what that meant at the time, especially in Florence, a city so culturally different from anywhere I had lived before. But now that I habitually grab a panino from Salumeria Verdi, cross the Ponte Vecchio at sunset and return home every day to Antonella’s “Buona sera!” from the kitchen, I think I’m beginning to feel at home.